Wassenaar Export Control Proposals Postponed to 2021 Due to Pandemic, BIS Official Says

The Bureau of Industry and Security had planned to submit several export control proposals for the 2020 Wassenaar Arrangement but will have to wait another year due to disruptions caused by COVID-19 (see 2004290044). Matt Borman, the Commerce Department's deputy assistant secretary for export administration, said Wassenaar has been unable to meet this year and could not gather recommendations for dual-use controls from member states.

BIS had prepared “a set” of emerging technology proposals that it hoped to push through at Wassenaar’s annual plenary in December, Borman said, which will not be held. “This year, because of the COVID situation, that arrangement has not had any meetings to come to any conclusions,” Borman said during a Nov. 9 Emerging Technology Technical Advisory Committee meeting. He said BIS’s 2020 proposals “will be carried over” to 2021.

The disruptions at Wassenaar may postpone U.S. implementation of some technology controls. While BIS can choose to bypass Wassenaar and impose the controls unilaterally, Borman and other BIS officials have said they prefer to first secure multilateral support (see 1910290062 and 1911070014), which they said will lead to more successful export restrictions. “If we're going to impose controls on new technologies,” Borman told the ETTAC, “the controls will be much more effective if we have like-minded countries that also have the potential to develop similar technologies imposing the same controls.”

Borman said BIS hopes to fall into a “sequence” of proposing controls by the middle of each calendar year so that the agency has time to review public comments and make revisions before proposing the controls at Wassenaar and other multilateral regimes. “We may end up doing unilateral controls ahead of the multilateral control,” Borman said. “But as a general rule, we would be looking to do these multilaterally before we implement them.” Many of BIS’s recent technology controls stemmed from proposals agreed to at Wassenaar in 2019, including October controls on six emerging technologies (see 2010020042) and September changes to national security controls under the Export Administration Regulations (see 2009100027).

BIS is also looking for suggestions for sources to help the agency “identify and evaluate emerging technologies,” Borman told the ETTAC, which was holding its second meeting since launching in May (see 2003050004 and 2002240033). Borman said BIS is “particularly interested” in technologies that fall under the categories of additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence, advanced materials, wireless communications and biotechnology.